Killer Cop aka My Old Man's Badge (Ferguson Findley, 1950)

One of those that count on the reader to not pay much attention. You know the type - we read them during our morning commute while on autopilot mode, craving coffee and still half-asleep. Incapable or just too lazy to be bothered by the apparent story flaws and inconsistencies.

But in these strange covid times, I have plenty of time, so I did pay attention, and here's how the plot thickens in this one:

1. Cops receive an anonymous letter tipping them that the cop killer from the past is back in town.
2. The letter's paper analysis reveals its poor quality. It must be used in one of the cheap hotels around Bovery.
3. They decide that the best way to handle this affair would be to send a man undercover.
4. They do. This man, our hero, tracks down the guy who's selling the paper.
5. This guy also runs the dope racket with a small gang of three misfits.
6. And one of them just has to be the wanted cop killer.

Mind you, this is just the beginning. It gets crazier.

Before proceeding, it's worth mentioning that everyone drinks excessively in this one. Billie even eats her breakfast with whiskey! So you cannot help but think that maybe the author himself had a drinking problem and was unable to keep the coherent story going for more than a couple of chapters. I'm not saying he did, but such issues would certainly help explain the occasional switch from the first to the third narration. Or needlessly establishing a character that would be soon dropped without much explanation.

It seems like the editor (huh?) was losing patience, too, the more they neared the end. We are treated with some hilarious stuff. Our hero is chasing the bad guy and is frantically shouting at witnesses, "Where did he go?" while a big blood trail splattered on the floor is clearly pointing in the right direction.

Even Johnny is not immune to the fatigue as this goes on. At one point, when weighting his options and assessing the possibilities of progressing the investigation, he simply abandons the idea and instead takes a nap:

It was interesting to think about, but I went to sleep instead.

Brilliant! And it had the potential to be one of those great little silly books. But it just doesn't know when to stop. Instead of wrapping it up with a bang, it goes on and on. True, even more silliness will follow, but the whole thing is less and less amusing and more and more boring with every page you turn.

So, I wouldn't recommend it for your commuting literature. You may fall asleep and miss your stop.

2.5/5

Facts:

Hero:
Johnny, the cop who "prowls the Greenwich Village streets"

Dames:

Billie, the junkie nightclub singer:

If she was the Billie Bloomer who was expected, the bartender's observation of "everything's in the right place" was entirely correct. There was plenty of it, too, so much that Tony mentally asked himself, "True or false?" She dropped one of her gloves on the floor as she hung her coat in the almost empty check room. As she bent over to pick it up, he saw the answer was "true."

She's cool, but the Countess de Callene is even cooler. Too bad she appears in just one scene, and her character serves no purpose other than having sex with our hero:

"Do you think I'm pretty?" she wanted to know.
Well, she was. For all I could tell, she was a dope taker and a tramp and God knows what, but she looked darned good, sitting there in that room wearing nothing but a sheet, and I told her so.

It's not really important, but it turns out she's not really of royal blood. And has a bit odd sense of humour:

"Were you born in Brooklyn?" I asked. "So was I."
"That makes us practically cousins, so we can't get married. All our children would be idiots, or Ptolemies, or born with two heads. I can't stand two-headed kids. Come over here and have another martini."

It wouldn't be fair not to mention his darling fiance, nurse Mary. A typical girl next door, not particularly interesting. But, unlike the Countess, she does have an important role. For some strange but convenient coincidence, one of the bad guys is wounded and ends up in the hospital where she works. You know - "of all the hospitals in NYC, she walks in mine",  And there's more. When realizing this guy is Johnny's suspect, she promptly injects the poor sucker with a truth serum!!

Location:
New York

Body count:
It opens with a couple of corpses (see below), but this is part of the story that establishes our hero. They are not linked directly to the main plot, so we can safely exclude them from the body count. In this prologue, we also witness the demise of Johnny's parents. We'll skip the mother, but his cop dad's death is pivotal to the story, so it counts.

Besides the old guy, there are four more violent deaths, so the grand total is 5.

Muddy's death is the best one by far. When Johnny finds him dying "with the purple-lipped hole in his chest, where a wide knife had been slipped between his ribs" he asks him "What's wrong?"

The object of desire:
Johhny wants to find his father's killer, but there's also a subplot that involves a shitload of heroin:

"We've got a nice little deal all arranged, Murphy. Couple of kilos of pure heroin, and I mean pure. It'll be worth a million dollars to us when we get it and cut it down."

By the way, cops have no problem with letting this deal go through to get closer to the cop killer!

Blackouts:
Almost:

I dove across the table and had my fingers at his throat when Cookie knocked me on the head with the butt of his gun and I went limp. He didn't knock me out, but I pretended to fade away. It gave me a chance to think what to do next.

References:
One of the bad guys has issues with Irish lads, so a cop provokes him by playing Molly Malone.

Here's Sinead O'Connor's version. Always lovely to hear this sad and beautiful song.

Cool Blurbs:
"She Lived For Love - He Killed For It"

Which sounds cool but has nothing to do whatsoever with the story. Shouldn't be surprised, really... published by Monarch.

Title:
Also misleading. Our hero kills only in the first paragraph and in the last sentence.

Edition:

Monarch Books #114, April 1959

Cover:
Pretty cool one. Even accurate in case it depicts the scene where Johnny and the Countess meet. Obviously, before the two-headed kids stuff happens...

The illustration is not credited. Any ideas?

Cool lines:
Great opening paragraph:

Smith & Wesson's Police-Model .38 is the smoothest-working revolver ever made, and yet I was having trouble breaking the cylinder to get rid of the five empties. It wasn't the gun's fault. It was mine. My hand was shaking as though I had been on the booze for three months, or as though I was a rookie cop who had just killed a couple of men.
Which I was.

Cop Killer (George Bagby, 1956)

I barely fell over the line with this one. Endless pages of convoluted sentences that can (and often do) switch context several times before they are finished. Written in some weird, archaic language in which bodies are cadavers, and there are not many nouns without accompanying adjectives like germinating, subcutaneous, lugubrious... Amusing at first, soon annoying, but then simply distracting. I lost interest and stopped looking up this crap in the dictionary halfway through.

The plot is decent, although somewhat simplistic, and could fit equally well into a short story or novelette. However, every story point is reestablished several times, and sometimes even the most trivial facts are described with almost obsessive attention to detail. To make this (even) worse, the duo of our investigative protagonists keeps mulling over these facts repeatedly, thinking aloud about them and discussing the theories and possibilities. The word "would" is probably used several times on every page.

No action, no story development. There are times when this becomes apparent even to our hero. But his typical response would be something like this:

Schmitty shook his head. "Just keeping more angles open," he said, "until they close up on me. We need contusions or abrasions."

The most shocking aspect of this one for me was realising that it was the 26th entry of the series that would go on and run for another 27 books. So, you collectors out there, if you're missing this one from his middle period, you may be interested to know that my copy is now available on eBay. Please give me a shout, and I'll be happy to offer you a discount. You deserve all the breaks you can get if you plan to go through with this one.

Boring.

2/5

Facts:

Hero:

It employs the gimmick in which narration is in the first person, and the author is supposed to be the narrator (he's not; his name is Aaron Marc Stein). This is generally fine, but in this case, it doesn't make sense. Dr Watson tagged along with Holmes, but you can't do that with the police inspector. Not unless you hold an official position that allows you to do so. An assistant? Maybe his partner? At least his best buddy news reporter or private detective? We just don't know. All we learn is that he is "his ink-stained shadow, Bagby".

So, the de facto hero in this one would be Inspect Schmidt, aka Schmitty. Bagby seems to be fanatically devoted to him with a passion bordering on something more than just professional admiration. I simply couldn't share such sentiment. The only thing that makes this guy special (eccentric?) is taking off the shoes whenever he gets a chance!? But more importantly, he's a bit of an asshole as he does fuck all about the savage beating some kid gets from his uncle or about the smacking that Miss Smith gets from Papa Black.

The bad guy(s):
The main suspect in the cop killing is a fifteen-year-old kid to whom more than a hundred pages are dedicated. Maybe justifiably, since he is a true badass who started his criminal career four years ago with "rushing the theatre door" at the movies.

Dames: 

Miss Smith is the only female character (!), and she appears twice (!!) on a grand sum total of three pages. But she's cool; I liked her a lot. And btw, she delivers the only cool line in the whole book. See below.

Location:
New York

Body count:

2

Title:
See 'the bad guy' section?

Edition:

World Distributer Books, WDL M914, 1959

Cover:

Same cover as the original Dell edition, by James Hill.

It's actually authentic in depicting the scene in which the kid is interrogated by the cops. They make him take off his shirt so they can examine the bruises his asshole uncle left him after giving him the "licking he wouldn't forget". Thankfully, these bruises are left out of the illustration.

Cool lines:
"Cigarette me, somebody," Miss Smith growled. "I'm half dead for a smoke.[The Coolest!]

Never Kill A Cop! (Hal Braham as Mel Colton, 1953)

Like in the last two posts, the cop gets murdered to kick off the proceedings in this one, too. But unlike those two - where the whole police department would get mobilized - here, nobody seems to be bothered with the killing.

Although our main protagonist is a cop, this is far from a typical police procedural. It's more like one of those small-town setups with local (corrupted) cops, (corrupted) politics, organized crime and - needless to say - scheming dames with some psychology thrown into the pot. You know, the type that guys like Jim Thompson and Gil Brewer perfected, and so when reading this, you can appreciate them even more and understand why they are such masters.

But don't get me wrong, this one is not bad at all. Just a bit chaotic. Starting with our hero, Danny, a hot-tempered badass who gets in fistfights no less than three times in the opening four chapters alone. One of them happens like this:

He jutted his chin out. "Who are you, a cop?"
I blew smoke in his face. His eyes blinked momentarily. I ran a thumb along the side of my lower lip. I said: "You keep following me and I'll slap you flat on your ass."
He looked me over carefully. He said it before he meant to, I guess, because it was either rank foolishness or smart talk, because he muttered, "You're sure one tough bastard-"
He went flat on his ass.

So don't expect any witty verbal exchanges or cool one-liners in this one. It needs to be said that Danny doesn't appear to be very bright either. He keeps getting deeper and deeper into a hole because of his totally irrational behaviour. Indeed, in a small town where everybody knows everybody, you wouldn't flee a bar after some brawl in which you have knocked off a guy unconscious? Can you really be surprised to find yourself a suspect after shooting at cops? After discovering the body and, for some reason, neglecting to report it to the authorities? And after deciding to keep the gun found in the dead man's pocket.

Thankfully, after a while, he does get his shit together and manages to solve the case. Although, if I wanted, I could probably easily find a bunch of inconsistencies that don't exactly hold water. But there's no need to do so. It's a quick, entertaining read with many shortcomings that actually make it charming. I particularly liked the ending and found it cool that our hero decided to move to California and get some real education:

"Out West, in California," I interrupted, "they have schools for cops. They're teaching them to be trained, professional men in police work. I'm going out there to one. I want to be a trained cop, Phil. I don't want to have to use fists all my life to prove a point or get a confession."

Always a good thing to see people aware of their shortcomings. Cops especially. And if I come across the sequel to this book, I'll be more than happy to pick it up and check on Danny's progress in California.

3/5

Facts:

Hero:
Danny Harrington, a cop... for a while... until he's demoted... and then reinstated again

Bad guy(s):
Mr Joslyn: the big shot gambler, the syndicate man from Centerville - the hub, the pivot.

Dames:
There's his girlfriend Irene and his sister Lil, but the main femme fatal in this one is definitely Martha:

Martha was sex. Sex wrapped up in cellophane. In a glass case. Never, never touch.[Fatale]

And speaking of sex, like almost everything else in this book, it's depicted in some crazy manner that one needs to decipher. And that makes it somewhat amusing. Check this as an example:

Then she began to groan and whimper and there was the suspicion of great pain, for there was constriction and there was desperation. There was the pressure of defiance, and the acceptance finally, and with the warm mellow glow that followed.

I think I can guess what the "Mellow glow" would be. But Great pain? Desperation?

Location:
The fictitious town of Bishop, fifty miles away from Centerville (huh), "the gambling syndicate's base of operations"

Body count:
5

The object of desire:
That, I think, is the biggest flaw because you have no idea what's driving this dude most of the time. Right after the opening killing, all he wants is to get laid. Either with Martha, his brother's wife (!) or with Irene, the girlfriend of his now ex-partner/friend (!!) who, btw, once saved his life. Then he gets this epiphany about "I've got to know the truth, one way or another", and finally is all about stepping out of the shadow of his younger, more successful brother.

And yet another example of this book being all over the place. But again, it's also something that makes it captivating. You simply can't tell what will follow in the next paragraph, let alone the next chapter.

References:
"Ever study Freud?" she asked quietly.
I shook my head. "Not much." I was watching the gun in her hand, and waiting for the tag line to come.
"This gun," she continued, "or any gun, is a male symbol."

Title:
Like in Never Kill a Cop, there's no comment needed. And they made the point in this one even stronger by adding an exclamation point to the end.

Edition:
ACE double D-19 MY

Cover:
Cool one by Bernard Barton. A bit ambiguous - Is she afraid of him, or is she trying to seduce him? Or both?

Cool lines:
"I'd rather we talk about you," she replied.
"You're talking about trouble, kid," I said.
Martha turned quickly and faced me. Her lips were so damn close I could feel her breath. "Maybe I like trouble," she snapped.

Cop Hater (Ed McBain, 1956)

I have read a few of McBain's books in the last couple of years and was saving this one for a special occasion. After all, it is the very first of the 87th precinct series that would go on and run for an incredible half a century, which - I guess - would make Cop Hater the mother of modern police procedurals. So, after reading Never Kill a Cop, I decided to stick with the cop-killing theme and finally picked up this one.

Despite its overly poetic tone (...dazzling galaxy of brilliant suns...) I was hooked after about 30 pages. Written exceptionally well in the flat, matter-of-fact narrative that manages to elegantly mix the intimate family parts with very gritty and realistic stuff about the police investigation mechanics. To take the latter to an extreme, several official forms are pasted into the text (see the "Bad Guy" section of the facts below).

After some initial dismay, I wasn't too bothered by them and actually found them amusing and took the time to read them instead of simply glancing over them. And I'm proud to report that I discovered an error in one: on the autopsy report, it's not explicitly stated that the measured height is actually the height of a skull. Hence, it reads like the victim was 28.9 centimetres tall (or short). Check it out yourself:

Btw - what the hell is chronological age? Or, re-phrasing it - what would be a non-chronological age?

The best part of these technicalities comes early when the team needs to create a cast of the shoe heel left imprinted in dog shit (!!). If you ever find yourself in such a predicament, here's a formula you should use.

So, yeah - it's cool, and we have a bit of everything here. Ballistics, various reports, autopsies, interviews, the line-up, and stool pigeons. Or, I should say, THE stool pigeon:

Danny Gimp is by far the best character in this one. The entire dialogue of the cops buying information from him (needless to say, taking place in a dingy bar, a.k.a. his office) is written in slang and is such a joy to read. It's about three pages long, so I have no intention of typing it here in its entirety. But it deserves at least its conclusion:

"I don't trust junkies," Bush said.
"Neither do I," Danny answered. "But this guy ain't a killer, take it from me. He don't even know how to kill time."[The Coolest!]

But I'm going too fast. Unfortunately, before I reached that part, I kind of lost interest. It simply gets bogged down too much. While I can understand the involvement of "the cynical newshawk" reporter Savage (to be honest, he actually contributes to the story development), I found that whole segment about juvenile delinquents' gang redundant and pretty silly. It just took away the momentum.

What finally spoiled it for me was the ending that felt like something hastily patched together, with the "twist" that you could see way ahead. I bet that all the police procedural fans out there felt cheated as hell with such a climax in which police work doesn't really mean shit, and the case break-through is so far-fetched. Furthermore, it felt like the author himself lost interest because (for example), towards the end, he still found time to fill two whole pages with Steve and his fiance being in a Chinese restaurant deciding on dishes they were about to order and decrypting fortune cookies...

Undeniably, this is good stuff, but it's just not my cup of tea. One of those in which the total sum of its parts amounts to much less than it should. It feels like the author put all his effort into research and his skills into creating the atmosphere but neglected the story itself. Especially the ending sucks.

3.5/5

Facts:

Hero:
An ensemble cast, but Steve Carella is our main guy:

He was a big man, but not a heavy one. He gave an impression of great power, but the power was not a meaty one. It was, instead, a fine-honed muscular power.

It's worth mentioning that he is partnered with Hank Bush in this one, and not yet with Bert Kling. But - spoiler ahead! - he will need a new partner once the case of the cop hater is resolved.

The bad guy(s):
Check out Dizzy's record on your left. Do you think he could be our titular cop hater?

Dames:
There's Steve's fiance Terry and several soon-to-be cop widows like Alice (dynamic blonde with a magnificent figure) and May (full-breasted woman in her thirties...with good legs, very white, and a good body... who could get drunk sniffing the vermouth cork before it was passed over a martini)

And let's not forget about the prostitute La Flamenca:

"And La Flamenca?"
"She's with him, probably cleaned out his wallet by this time. She's a big red-headed job with two gold teeth in the front of her mouth, damn near blind you with them teeth of hers. She's got mean hips, a big job, real big. Don't get rough with her, less she swallow you up in one gobble."

Nice! This girl should have been a part of John Waters' Dreamlanders misfits. What a great pair she would have made with Edith Massey.

Location:
The city in these pages is imaginary.
The people, the places are all fictitious.
Only the police routine is based on established investigatory technique.

Body count:
3 dead cops and 2 persons on death row, so it's safe to sum it up to 5.

There's also one unrelated death in an episode in which a housewife snaps and kills her asshole husband with a hatchet! This sad (and funny?) story is definitely one of the novel's high points and a great example of McBain's brilliant writing.

Blackouts:
none

References:
There's a reference to Joyce's Ulysses, but its inclusion seemed forced. Never read it but would still somehow agree with "Christ, that had been one hell of a book to get through."

Plus, when some suspect gets interrogated, he establishes his alibi by watching the following movies in the local cinema: The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Body and Soul, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Violent Saturday.

And what an incredible coincidence this was, because I had seen Body and Soul just the night before reading this! And a terrific movie it is. Hazel Brooks is great, even though her role is pretty minor.

Title: 

Somebody is killing cops, so police assume they are dealing with the cop hater.

Dedicated to:
This is for Dodie and Ray

Edition:
Permabooks M-3037, 2dn printing - April 1956

Cover:
Instead of the usual illustration, this one is a collage of photographs by Daniel Rubin. And it makes sense since they were going for realism so hard.

Cool lines:

"We didn't mean to disturb your beauty sleep," Bush said nastily.
The girl raised one eyebrow. Then why did you" She blew out a cloud of smoke, the way she had seen movie sirens do.

"Do I detect sarcasm in your voice, Lieutenant?" Savage asked.
"Sarcasm is a weapon of the intellectual, Savage. Everybody, especially your newspaper, knows that cops are just stupid, plodding beasts of burden."

Never Kill a Cop (Lee Costigan, 1959)

The last couple of posts were too long, and I blame this on my regained enthusiasm after neglecting this blog for three years. I'll try to keep this one brief, but it's a shame because it deserves a more thorough review.

A terrific police procedural with its main storyline intertwining with another, told from the perpetrator's point of view. So, it's not much of a mystery, but there's plenty of action, intrigue, romance, and even humour to make it a real page-turner. Great pace, too, as the whole thing is finished over three days. And, btw, chapters are titled by days and timespans within them, which is something I always like to see.

It all ties nicely together, and technical details—more often than not overplayed in police procedurals—are balanced just right in the proper dosage. We have the technological wonders of the IBM computer (along with stacks of punching cards, of course), polygraph tests, ballistic lab stuff, and basically loads of hard work and determination that pay off. The investigation doesn't simply follow from point A to point B, but instead, there are many bum leads and realistic obstacles, like the little episode in which a cop runs out of gas while driving to pick up a major witness! Did I mention there was some humour in this one? Additionally, refer to the "Bad guy" section of the facts below for more.

I do have a few minor complaints. Negro/nigger words are used too often. However, it needs to be said that such racist language is used strictly as a characterisation tool (nicer people would say 'blackfella') and to make the novel more realistic. I hope. I certainly didn't get the impression there was anything intentionally racist about it.

It wouldn't suffer much from trimming of 20-odd pages and a slight rewrite of the ending. I don't think that the asshole pimp Lucas should break that easily. However, at that point, we are past page 200, so it's likely Mr Costigan just wanted to wrap it up. Like I'm doing now.

Short enough?

4/5

Facts:

Hero:
Detective Lieutenant Johnny Cristo is the main character we follow, but in some ways, the hero of this story would be the entire police precinct. I especially liked Eleanor, "the diminutive little lady", who runs the IBM mainframe.

The bad guy(s):
Syndicate running Old Man is the top dog, and the main villains are the ex-pimp Frank Lucas - "a graduate of Sing Sing, an alumnus of San Quentin" and his henchman Marthusian.

But the real star is Fenton, the hitman. We get some idea of him upon his first appearance:

There was no stamp of the Syndicate upon him. There was something odd, though, something strangely fanatic in his face.
It was his eyes. They were dark, luminous, and they seemed never to blink. Frank Lucas had once seen a movie in which John Brown had stormed the arsenal at Harpers Ferry.
Fenton reminded him of John Brown.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that he steals the entire show, but he's definitely a cherry on the cake. Some piece of work this guy is. The polar opposite of the usual professional hitman. Not very bright since he kills a cop at the airport toilet right upon his arrival and later  - even worse - kills the wrong guy!? And why, you may ask? Well, he simply picked his target's address from the phonebook, and there happened to be a couple of guys with the same name. So, forget the usual stuff about hit preparation, such as long surveillance and gathering information about the target's habits. All that Fenton requires is the name, the address and a piece of advice from the newspaper's horoscope (!!):

Today is a propitious one for action which you may have been holding off for days or even months. Act today to buttress your position at work, in financial dealings or in matters of love.

Not exactly a psychopath. To one of his victims, he looks like "a Midwest farmer dressed for a church breakfast".

It's hilarious to read about the troubles he's putting his employees through. Even though he's told numerous times to back off until things cool down after the cop-killing fuck-up, he doesn't even consider giving up. When Lucas suggests hiding him in one of his establishments (since he's a pimp, you can imagine what they would be), Fenton flatly rejects such an idea because he's a religious man and won't stay in "them" houses. And he's no drinking man either, which drives Marthusian crazy later when he chaperones him.

Dames:
There's Johnny's love interest, Terry. She's cool, and this time I wasn't bothered too much with the "I Love You" crap after their one-night stand.

And we have seductress stewardess Sally with "curves that seemed to move with a life of their own" and "stacked like a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield". But she's around only briefly for an interview and to give our Johnny boy some ideas...

Finally, there's Mrs Lucas. She is mentioned for the first time when her husband is introduced:

There was a man with a record as long as his arm, and a woman with a record barely shorter... The man's name was Frank Lucas and the woman was his wife.

And:

He had a pretty wife, younger than himself, intelligent and elastic enough to hide her past.

And finally, for the only time when she briefly makes an appearance, she's described as a "stylish woman of statuesque proportions".

But unfortunately, that's it. Intriguing (elastic!?) with great potential but not used at all. It would be cool to find a prequel to this book centred around her and Fenton.

Location:
I don't recall it being explicitly named, so it would be one of those 87th precincts: "the city in these pages is imaginary".

Body count:
3 (+ 1 Fentom's victim that is not directly related)

The object of desire:
Finding a cop killer

Blackouts:
None

References:
Did Frank see Michael Curtiz's Santa Fe Trail, and Fenton reminded him of Raymond Massey?

Cool Blurbs:
There are no notable blurbs, but I'm including the back cover scan anyway, as I find it amusing to see an advertisement for a book related to Jesus Christ on the back of a pulp paperback. Bad sales?

Title: 
Another pretty self-explanatory one.

Dedicated to:
"To Ann"

Edition:
Pocket Book #1256,  2nd printing, November 1959

Cover:
Nice one. No credits, but according to pulpcovers.com, done by Darrel Greene.

Cool lines:
There's a nice and somewhat tender subplot concerning one cop whose wife is growing tired of his constant absence and is about to leave him. So, it was nice to read this in the epilogue:

Motorcycle Patrolman Ryndes had solved his domestic problem by kidnapping his son, leaving him at his mother-in-law's, pouring three martinis into his wife and attacking her in bed.

That's an original and cool way to wrap up the book with a happy ending!

It Ain't Hay (David Dodge, 1946)

I had really hoped it wouldn't be one of those...

It starts okay-ish with the classic setup of a guy sitting in his office and a secretary admitting a somewhat shady client. Unfortunately, our hero, James Whitney, is no hard-boiled P.I., and his secretary is no Velda. She is his "middle-age female watchdog" (his words, not mine!), and he is an income-tax consultant. But what the hell,  let's not be prejudiced and judge people on despicable professions they do to pay the bills.

My eyebrows started to lift slightly as early as in the second chapter. After a hard day's work, Whitney takes his wife to a local restaurant for a quiet dinner by candlelight. All good and romantic until the place is attacked by some raving lunatic. He gets subdued, and one of the patrons, who happens to be a psychiatrist, offers an explanation of what just happened:

"The way he walked in attracted my attention. As soon as he ordered the muscatel I suspected him, because drug addicts who drink at all like something sweet and bland. I knew it was marijuana when I looked at his eyes. Opium or morphine or another opiate would have contracted the pupils instead of expanding them."

So now we know where we stand. But our Jimmy still doesn't, and so the next day, he visits his good friend, Detective Lieutenant Webster and is promptly given a quick prison tour during which we meet an eighteen-year-old kid bashing his head on prison bars. You see, he had been so hopped up on two reefers ("one might have been enough") the night before that he smashed the heads of his pa, ma and fourteen-year-old sister with a baseball bat!

Yes, by this time, it is clear it's going to be one of those... drugs are bad... kids, don't do drugs...

Not surprisingly, it turns out that the shady character from the book's opening chapter is some prominent mobster (he bears a resemblance to the French ambassador) who needs James to handle his money laundering. It's never explained why such a badass would randomly pick up his tax consultant from the Yellow Pages. Keep in mind that this is taking place 15 years after Al Capone's imprisonment for tax evasion, and one would think that by this time, the Syndicate would have established a team of legal experts on tax matters. Or something...

But this is just a minor inconsistency compared to some forthcoming hard-to-swallow shit. Webster soon joins forces with James (mind you, not the other way around!), but for some reason, it doesn't occur to either of them that the easiest way to bring this guy down would be for James to simply take the offered job. Surely, it would be a piece of cake to expose somebody's tax wrongdoings when you have access to the accounting books. This becomes especially unusual in the light of later developments when none of them has a problem with sending a grieved widow off to be bait when capturing some crazed (needless to say - hoped-up) maniac whose rap sheet includes rape, among other felonies. Was there no policewoman available in the entire SFPD willing to go undercover?

Not to mention the whole elaborate sub-plot about smuggling the hay from Mexico. It makes a little sense because just before revealing this master plan, we learn that the weed can be (and actually is) planted all over the USA. After all, it is super resistant. Is it possible that even back in the 40s, South Americans were scapegoats for the American drug problem?

Whatever. No need to go into that. What is worth exploring a bit is how our team of experts uncovers the connection between marijuana and Mexico. It is very straightforward - our mobster owns a tuna fishing boat, and apparently, commercial tuna finishing is carried off the coast of Mexico. And that's basically it, I kid you fucking not! All I can add is that at least the publisher was honest enough to call this "A Dell Thriller" and not "A Dell Mystery".

However, calling it a thriller would be somewhat of an exaggeration. There are pages and pages of needless padding. Towards the end - when things should really be speeding up - there's an almost dialogue-less chapter that is entirely dedicated to establishing some minor henchman's badass character. I am not sure what the point is because the guy gets killed shortly after, anyway. Was the author chasing some word count? It's hard to believe, considering the book is 200 pages long. Did he go overboard with the research and was simply a bit stoned?

I wanted to like it, but this one is all over the place. Nothing really works. But still, let's conclude on a positive, educational note. If you have ever wondered why musicians do drugs, this may help you understand:

"Look at some of these musicians that use it. It excites them, makes them high and hot, so they can beat the music out faster, get in the extra licks they couldn't handle otherwise. They are in the groove, and the groove is boogie-woogie - for them. For somebody else, the grove is rape or murder or arson."

And for all of you out there who are considering switching back from consuming hard opiates to just smoking pot, this may be useful to know:

"Opium doesn't give you trouble?"
"Don't get me wrong. Opium is plenty bad for anybody that uses it. I meant that hop smokers want to get off in a corner and go to sleep, not hell around looking for trouble. A hay head has to be near other people; he's excited, steamed up, talkative, full of vinegar. He's like a stick of dynamite in a fire. Maybe he'll burn with a nice hot flame, maybe he'll blow up in your face. You just can't tell."

So now you know.

2/5

Facts:

Hero:
James Whitney may be "big, strong and handsome", but at the same time, he's also a dull, conservative, vain, and ego-centric asshole.

The bad guy(s):
That would be Barney, Tony and Max from the list of characters. Tony is a bit of a psycho, so there was some possibility of at least minor character development. But, of course, it never happened.

Dames:
No strong women characters either. Kitty (as voluptuous and luscious as she is) is introduced at the beginning, and she only reappears briefly at the end with the sole purpose of wrapping it up with a proper, family-friendly kind of ending. Iris and Rosa are more interesting, but both are totally underused. Rosa especially gets some pretty shitty treatment:

The story does take a somewhat cool detour in chapter 13 (titled "Better than a Drink"), in which James gets drunk and stoned (on a single reefer, mind you) and actually scores with Rosa. That's the cool part. But instead of keeping her around and actually involving her in the case, this pathetic tax consultant gets such a guilty conscience that he goes to see a shrink (chapter "Undressing the Inner Man")! What follows next is more nonsense about drug addiction and related childish psychology. And poor Rosa is more or less out of the picture. Too bad, I liked her.

Location:
San Francisco

Body count:
Discounting all the nonsense in various cautionary tales about hoped-up kids killing their family members with baseball bats and such, all that remains at the end is just a single proper corpse.

The object of desire:
Of all the flaws mentioned, I believe this is the book's most significant one. What drives our hero for 200 pages is nothing but vanity. He simply cannot get over the fact that he was beaten by some hoodlums.

This guy is so upset that for five weeks can't be bothered to pick up the phone and give a ring to his wife after she has left him with the "chasing gangsters or keeping me" choice.

And there's more to this obsession. He makes a deal with (not just one but two) cops that they would give him 15 minutes alone with the main bad guy before they arrest him. Huh, seriously? Come on!

Blackouts:
Two of them. First time when he's beaten and then again after he manages to drag himself home.

References:
Eddie Schwartz, the "nighthawk elevator man" is reading some story titled "Rape on the Range" in "Spicy Western Stories" magazine. And it didn't sound too bad either. I tried to find it online, but it turned out that both the story and the magazine were fictitious. But googling it, I found this cool gallery of spicy westerns scans.

And during the aforementioned shrink session, there's a reference to none other than Othello:

"Let me read you one more clinical report. This is Cassio, who got drunk as a pig and made a fool of himself. Hes says: Oh God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should, with joy, pleasance, revel and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!"
John closed the book with a snap.
"'Transform ourselves,' Whit. Remember it."
"Great little guy, Casio," Whit said. "I know just how he felt. Be sure to send me a bill."

Title: 
Indeed, by now, no additional explanation is needed.

Dedicated to:
This book is dedicated to my good friend Joe O'Ferrall

Chief of the Division of Narcotic Enforcement, Department of Justice, State of California, and to the men who work with him.

Edition:
Dell #350

Cover:
Stunning illustration by Gerald Gregg. And despite all the above bitching and ranting, I'm keeping this book in my collection until the day I die.

Cool lines:
Nothing really cool, but every now and then, you come across some bizarre, WTF stuff like this:

The chief was a middle-aged Irishman with bright pink cheeks, white hair, and electric blue eyes. A strong chin accompanied the patriotic color scheme.[The Coolest!]

I'll bet a dollar that place is harder to get into without an appointment than an abortionist's operating room.

Target: Mike Shayne (Brett Halliday, 1959)

End of the hiatus, I'm back! Plenty of time to kill in these strange covid times, and besides, I've been missing the quiet nights in the company of my good friends Arthur Guinness, Joe Camel, Tom Waits and such. So, let's make social distancing fun again!

The good old gumshoe Michael Shayne is as good as anyone to help me restart this blog. I keep chasing these books on eBay because of their incredible McGinnis' covers and keep reading them even though they turn out to be pretty lame for the most part. Especially the latter additions to the series, when they were penned by God knows which ghostwriter, vary a lot in quality. With over 200 pages, this one is quite hefty, so I was reluctant to pick it up. But as usual, I was eventually persuaded by the voluptuous blonde giving me looks from the bookshelf.

Glad I did, and I'm happy to report that the book's length is more than justified, as it covers two intertwining stories. They both revolve around an ex-con who's planning a heist while also dividing his attention to plot the murder of a particular private detective who had put him into the slammer.

The heist part is excellent. It's not the usual bank or armoured car job, but a high-stakes private poker game on the top floor of a luxurious hotel, which makes it a bit more elaborate. The author puts in a good effort to describe just enough details of our team's preparation and execution. Which goes reasonably smoothly, and they actually manage to pull it off! During the heist, there's a cool detail that reminded me of Melville's Bob le Flambeur when Clayton (the inside man) gets on the roll with the dice and starts winning big time. Don't know; maybe our mysterious ghostwriter also saw the movie and got inspired. It was released only three years before the publication of this book.

The team of misfits makes it interesting: along with Clayton, there's a femme fatale past her prime (both of them on their "last job") and a trigger-happy, somewhat psychotic kid. A well-known template that has been used countless times before and since, and it works well here. The shifting alliances and relationships between the three are sometimes more compelling than the job itself. Good stuff, indeed.

What ruins it for me is our main man himself. Shayne is Mike Hammer's distant cousin, so excessive drinking and a conservative, macho persona do come along with the territory. And we've got used to this. Fine. However, in this case, his "lone wolf against the system" attitude is taken to absurd and even comical extremes. His dogged determination goes as crazy as beating the cops (twice!), and in the final showdown, he literally uses his wheelchair as a weapon. It stopped being funny after 50 pages and became simply annoying for the remaining 150+.

But all in all, this one is an interesting addition to the series. Also, to be fair, it does have a cool identity swap twist at the end that I didn't see coming. And now, when this one is off the shelf, I can see another beauty smiling straight at me. So stay tuned.

3.5/5

Facts:

Hero:

"Is Shayne still around?"
"Who?" she asked sleepily.
"Mike Shayne, the fearless, incorruptible, two-fisted private eye."

And then a tall, rangy figure came out of the hotel. His shoulders were wide and powerful, and he had the narrow hips and long legs of an athlete. His face was deeply lined. Even before she saw the red hair Miriam knew that this was Mike Shayne.

Dames:

Barring Shayne's faithful secretary and love interest, Lucy, Miriam is the only woman in this one. I'm including the back cover scan, but that description doesn't do her justice. I found her to be quite a complex and likeable character.

Location:
Miami

Body count:
Only 2. Possibly another one, as Clayton is badly injured, and doctors don't know if he will survive.

The object of desire:
For Clayton - killing Shayne while getting some money and eventually going away with Miriam

For Miriam - getting some money at first but at the end simply keeping Clayton 

For Fran - killing some people

Blackouts:
None less than on three occasions. During the climax, he first gets shot point-blank in his side with a dummy bullet, but he's such a tough guy that it doesn't put him out yet. But the next bullet, this one to his head (and obviously dummy too), does the job and "The night closed down around him".

Once he's in the hospital and interrogated by the cops, he blacks out due to exhaustion: "Shayne could feel the mists beginning to close in around him again."

Finally, after his semi-successful wheelchair attack, he loses consciousness because he's totally exhausted from the fight and preceding chase. This one is also pretty straightforward: "He felt a violent explosion behind his eyes."

Title: 

Clayton holds a grudge against Shayne for putting him in prison thirteen years ago. Now he's out, and it's payback time.

Dedicated to:

"For Leah and Lee with Love"

Blame it on covid-19 psychosis, but I actually did some sleuthing myself to find out who the author is. From this very informative page on Shayne, I got the list of ghostwriters and then checked their biographies for kids, spouses or friends named Leah and Lee. Came up with nothing. So far...

Edition:

Dell D355, first printing - June 1960

Cover:

Another gorgeous and iconic illustration by Bob McGinnis. A fantastic job that must have substantially accelerated the sales (it definitely made me buy it). 

Cool lines:

As he crouched on the floor, his forehead was on a level with her automatic. He started to bring up the tommy gun. She shot him between the eyes.[Fatale]